Hacker Wins Bug Bounty After Exposing Critical Facebook Security Flaw

A hacker from California has revealed a trick which could allow him to hack into a user’s Facebook account and gain complete access to it.

Learning to hack a Facebook account is one of the first things people want to learn. Many try their hand at this to gain complete access to someone’s Facebook profile. One California-based hacker tried his method, and subsequently discovered a method that exploits Facebook’s password reset mechanism to hack into anyone’s Facebook profile.

Gurkirat Singhhas revealed that hediscovereda way to gain access to anyone’s Facebook profile using a flaw in the social networking site’s password reset mechanism. He said that the only way for anyone to reset their Facebook password is to use a randomly generated 6-digit code which Facebook provides them with once they request a password reset.

The algorithm behind it produces a truly random number. But the fact that it is a 6-digit code means that there are a possible 106 = 1,000,000 combinations. These remain the same until they are used. Gurkirat exploited this fact.

According to him, Facebook needs to store duplicate codes for multiple users if more than 1,000,000 users request a password reset. This means that more than two people have the same passcode. To use this for his purpose, Gurkirat Singh devised a way to send in 2 million password change requests to Facebook

He mentions that doing so is not simple, for it requires a way to change your IP to avoid being blocked by the company, as well as access to 2 million Facebook IDs. Since Facebook IDs are 15-digit long, Singh used 1,00,000,000,000,000 and made queries to Facebook Graph API to see which IDs were valid. This can only be done through authorized apps, and once a match is found, you can enter the ID in the URL likewww.facebook.com/[ID]. The URL then automatically changes the ID to the username. This data was compiled into a JSON by Singh.

To handle the problem of IP changing, Gurkirat Singh simply used a proxy server that listened to HTTP Requests and then assigned a random IP address to each request. He used a multithreaded script to simulate user behaviour when a passcode is required. The script requests a passcode to every user in the JSON file created earlier. Then the scripts were run to make the requests. It looked like this:

After doing so, the 6-digit passcode needs to be matched using the Brute force technique. Singh added ID to the key ‘u’ and the successfully matched passcode to the key ‘n’ in the URL aswww.beta.facebook.com/recover/password?u=…&n=… Doing so returned a match.

Once this was done, Singh added this matched passcode to the URL and was redirected to the password reset page. Therefore, he was successful in gaining access to a user’s account using this method. Singh said that the bounty offered to him was a mere $500, as Facebook considered this as a low priority finding.

Ali Raza is a freelance journalist with extensive experience in marketing and management. His work has been featured in many major crypto and tech websites including Hacked, Hackread, ValueWalk, Cryptoslate, CCN, and Globlecoinreport to name a few. Raza is the co-founder of 5Gist.com, too, a site dedicated to educating people on 5G technology.

HACKREAD is a News Platform that centers on InfoSec, Cyber Crime, Privacy, Surveillance and Hacking News with full-scale reviews on Social Media Platforms & Technology trends. Founded in 2011, HackRead is based in the United Kingdom.